I want to add a second 1 TB drive to my DELL Studio XPS 9100, purely for backup.

In the past I have purchased WD, Seagate or Maxtor drives.

A buddy at work mentioned to stay away from the current crop of Seagate drives as he read failure rates were really high of late ; but the user revews on vendors sites from WD drives are also hit and miss.

1) Do the current current crop of 1 TB drives have sort of higher than normal failure rate? Ironiically, thats a reason to purchase a backup drive !!

2) Are the external USB drives a more reliable choice ? Peformance is not a factor here - this is strictly for backup. The external are a bit more costly, but if indeed they are more reliable, its worth it..

I am not aware of high failure rates among Seagate drives. Regardless, you should not go on the basis of one recommendation from one friend who heard something or another.

The whole idea of a backup drive is redundancy. It should not matter which drive fails, because your important files will always be in two places. Given that, I recommend Seagate since they have a five year warranty.

There are two disadvantages to an external drive. First, they are much more subject to getting knocked around and damaged. Second, they are slower. If you have an internal option, that's the best way to go.

For curiousity, I contacted my buddy to see what reference he was quoting ( it was not his own recommnedation).

I note many of the Seagate now ahve three yr ( vs fiver year warranty) ... and some WD have fiver year ( vs three) . Only seagate seems to qupte MTBF , eg still 750,000 hours , but thats a bit hard to believe.

Regardless of make, some of the mixed/negative user comments re failure rates do seem suprisingly high for such a mature product ( the hard drive). then again perhaps TB territory is a new ball game.

Seagate is in the process of reducing its warranties to match the other manufacturers. It had a lot of problems with drives when it shifted most of its manufacturing from Singapore and Thailand to mainland China, which is in part why it lengthened its warranties.

The biggest problem with hard drives is that they're still physically fragile - it doesn't take much of a drop to cause internal damage. I'd venture most drives that fail early were subject to rough handling somewhere along the line.